Editors' Review

Paint.NET is a full-featured image editing program that gives you tons of tools to work with through an intuitive and streamlined interface. Whether you just want to touch-up your photos before you share them with friends or you need high-quality images for another type of project, this program will get you where you need to go.

Pros

Nice interface: This app presents all of the tools you need to create beautiful images in a clean and accessible way. Many of these are arrayed around the main working window, while others are contained within their own windows, which you can reposition anywhere on the screen to clear the space you want to work in.

Lots of tools: Whether your project involves adding layers, introducing text, or using filters and effects to get the look you're going for, you'll find what you need in this program. There are more options in all of these categories than you'll probably ever use, giving you the ability to create just about anything you could imagine.

Cons

No extremes: This program is a good option for intermediate users. It isn't quite accessible enough to make it the right choice for users who have no experience with photo editing programs, and it doesn't offer all of the advanced features that experienced users will be looking for.

Layers for text: While this app does let you introduce text into your images, you have to create it in a separate layer if you want to be able to move it around or experiment with it as you work. This may not be a huge inconvenience, but it does add an extra step to a lot of projects.

Bottom Line

Paint.NET has a lot to offer when it comes to editing and enhancing images for a variety of purposes. It's a free app that provides nearly as much functionality as some of the more highly rated image editing programs and makes these features available to everyone.

Publisher's Description

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plug-ins.

Great with basic image manipulation. Also has a number of more complex tools, giving it the potential to do a lot.

Cons

The tools don't always work right. In particular, I have a terrible time setting a background transparent, or putting text over an existing image. Sometimes I can do it when the program first starts. Other times, the tools just don;t work like they are supposed to.

Summary

This is a great program for basic image manipulation and combination. But for more complex tasks, it's not reliably effective.

When installing the .NET Framework, the installer took me to a third-party website to download .NET Framework 4.6.1 as if that was going to make me feel like I had chanced upon a secure website. No, I won't fall for that phishing trick. I'm downloading the real deal from Microsoft. I wanted a photo editor, not a phishing expedition.

I used to love Paintnet. While it didn't do everything and a few interfaces were clunky, it was superior to Paint.

Cons

Opened the program today and it told me to update. So I did. Kind of. It completely froze my computer while in the install stage. When I finally rebooted (after needing to have a disk checked) it had uninstalled the old version but not installed the new one. I though that maybe I had too many programs open.
A few hours later, with very few windows open, I tried again. Just like the movie Groundhog Day, the same thing happened; I waited and waited to see if this was temporary but it wasn't.
I had to turn off my computer, and when it rebooted, go through the disk check again.
Updated but definitely not improved.
I'm looking for a different program.

can't draw circle and triangle but just rectangle. this increases the time of drawing because i force to use several lines to draw them instead.
The default screen size of painting is a bit little, maybe 900*700 is good.

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Full Specifications

Fixed a crash that would happen when closing an image, exiting the app, or sometimes just at random. This was happening due to a bug in Direct2D where ID2D1EffectContext does not honor the multithreaded initialization flag from its ID2D1Factory, and was thus corrupting its own internal data structures when released on the finalizer thread.

Fixed: DirectX 9 GPUs can now utilize hardware acceleration again (in 4.1.3 they were forced to use software rendering)